New! Alpha Anywhere 3.0
Create and deploy offline-capable mobile and web business apps FAST. Plus, over 70 other new features!
Read the Offline Overview Article
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Robust Offline - No Incremental Time or Cost
According to one of the two leading Analyst firms, the ability to work offline is the "most important, difficult and expensive (yet valuable) mobile feature and will be a consideration for nearly every future modern application." But in the real world, a reliable connection isn't always guaranteed - and building an application that intelligently synchronizes data when signal is restored is far from trivial...unless you use Alpha Anywhere.
With Alpha Anywhere 3.0, offline support is built-in, adding no incremental time and cost versus other solutions that typically triple time and cost accoring to Wired Magazine.
Alpha Anywhere 3.0 makes it incredibly easy to:
- Store and display transaction details, including changes, errors, and updates
- Synchronize stored transactions back to the server
- Detect and resolve data collision and other errors
- Incrementally download updated data to the client from the server
- Support for hierarchical JSON and linked-table SQL, including write conflict detection with roll-back
- Granular control over multi-transaction synchronization to better deal with long synchronization operations
- Built-in, automatic use of browser "localStorage" to persist data and state
- Automatic creation of a manifest file to make use of the browser's appCache mechanism for persisting web apps HTML, CSS, etc.
Alpha Anywhere is trusted by thousands of companies worldwide.
What Else Is New In Alpha Anywhere 3.0?
Build Offline / Disconnected Applications
With Alpha Anywhere, you can now build applications that continue to work even when users are offline (i.e. you do not have an internet connection).
While offline, you can continue editing the existing records in an application, enter new records, and mark records as deleted. When a connection becomes available, simply click/tap on a 'synchronize' button and the edits that you made while disconnected are pushed to the server and the server database is updated.
MongoDB And Other NoSQL Database Support
NoSQL document databases are becoming popular for certain types of applications. A new MongoDB class has been added to Xbasic to make it easy to query, update and manage a MongoDB database from Xbasic. Support for other NoSQL document databases, such as Couch, will also be added soon.Security Framework - Social Login With Google, Facebook, Twitter And LinkedIn
You can now allow users to log into an Alpha Anywhere application using a 'social network' login.
The social network logins are referred to as 'alternative logins' because they provide an alternative way for a user to log into their account in the Alpha Anywhere security system using their social network credentials, rather than the userid/password associated with their account in the Alpha Anywhere security system.
Learn more about Social Login
Security Framework - Active Directory
The Security Framework for Web Applications now supports Active Directory. That means you can authenticate a user using an Active Directory server.
Client-side Templating
Client-side templating allows you to generate HTML for display by merging a data object into a template. The client-side template library in Alpha Anywhere is extremely powerful and can be compared with similar functionality in 3rd party templating libraries, such as Mustache.js and Handlebars.js.
In the video below we show how a complex template can be designed to display data (a list of Orders with OrderItems for each order) in a richly formatted display. The video shows how the templating system can compute values, including summary values.
Watch the video
Calling SOAP Web Services From Xbasic
Alpha Anywhere 3.0 introduces support for calling SOAP Web Servies from Xbasic. In the release notes, we have documented three real world examples of how this is done: WorldPay (a credit card processing company), Kareo (a medical billing software company) and Norman G Jensen, Inc(a provider of freight brokerage services).
Displaying Data From Twitter
The Twitter API returns data in JSON format. The List control on a UX component is easily populated with JSON data. The Twitter API, however, is a little tricky to work with because it requires an OAuth authorization before you can call the API functions. Xbasic contains two built-in functions that simplify this.
In the video example below, we show how you can easily build a List control that displays Tweets that are retrieved by making a REST API call to Twitter.
In the example we use built-in Xbasic functions to get a 'bearer token' from Twitter. Once we have this token, we can make calls to the Twitter API to get data in a JSON format that is used to populate the List control.
Watch the video
PhoneGap Document Handler Plugin - Displaying .PDF, .XLSX, .DOCX Files
( Learn more about Alpha Anywhere's seamless PhoneGap integration released in version 2.0)
Unlike desktop browsers, the browsers on mobile devices typically do not have built-in handlers for displaying .pdf, .xlsx, .docx and certain other types of files.
If your mobile application is wrapped using PhoneGap you can easily use the built-in native document viewer on both Android and iOS devices.
Watch the video
PhoneGap - Using Native Transitions
( Learn more about Alpha Anywhere's seamless PhoneGap integration released in version 2.0)
If you wrap a UX component in a PhoneGap shell you can now use native transitions to animate certain Panel Cards in your app into view. This feature relies on the Native Transitions PhoneGap plugin (iOS only).
Watch the video
CURL
CURL is a popular utility that can be used for many tasks, such as making REST API calls. CRUL is now exposed as a top level Xbasic object, allowing you to execute CRUL commands from your Xbasic code.
Many APIs are documented using CURL examples.
You can use a built-in genie to convert a CURL command into an Xbasic script.
Learn more about CURL Object
Sending E-mail From The Client Using Mandrill
Alpha Anywhere has well documented methods for sending email from a web component. These method are all server-side method. An Ajax callback is made to the server and the e-mail is sent from the server. However, it is possible to send an e-mail directly from the client without involving the Alpha Anywhere server at all using the Mandrill Mail service.Executing Shell Commands Directly From The Interactive Window
You can now execute shell commands directly from the Interactive Window. You no longer have to open a separate CMD window to execute shell commands. This can be a very useful time saver for developers.
For example, when building an application that uses REST APIs, it is common for the API documentation to show how you can use CURL to execute the REST command. Using the Interactive Shell, CURL commands can be executed directly from the Interactive Window.
Watch the video
Submitting All Of The Data In A List Control On An Ajax Callback
When an Ajax callback is made, the data in the variables on the UX are submitted, but the data in List controls are not submitted. There may be situations where you want to submit all of the data that are currently in a List control to the server.
In this video we show how you can 'harvest' the data that is in a List control and then submit that data to the server when you make an Ajax callback.
Watch the video
Populating Data using JavaScript
The data in a tree control on a UX component can easily be set using JavaScript. In this video we show how to repopulate the entire tree, or dynamically add a node to an existing tree.
Watch the video
More Features, Video Tutorials and Documentation
Please note that this page is just a sampling of the over 70 new features that are part of Alpha Anywhere 3.0.
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